


The Mould of the Auricle

by softestpunk



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game)
Genre: First Time, M/M, Post-Canon, What Measure Is A Non-Human?, human/elf politics, this is maybe a mess idk it's just a thought
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-10-01 20:11:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20391091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softestpunk/pseuds/softestpunk
Summary: “Listen,” Iorveth began. “That.” He pointed to the panting heap on the ground, “is Vernon Roche, and the only person allowed to put him in an early grave is me.”They may not have recognised Iorveth, but Roche’s name seemed to give them pause. A whisper travelled between the three of them, the words “Roche” and “half-breed” the only ones Iorveth picked up.Post-retirement, Iorveth makes a discovery about Roche--which leads him to contemplate a lot of unanswered questions.





	The Mould of the Auricle

**Author's Note:**

> For the trope bingo square: rivals to lovers
> 
> Shoutout to [quills_at_dawn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quills_at_dawn) for selfless encouragement :D

Raindrops like acorns broke on the mud-slick cobbles as Iorveth trudged back to his modest rooms tucked behind the market square, on his way home from collecting a pension just generous enough to offer a level of comfort that made him disinclined to rebel. Life under Nilfgaard, he was learning, was about being content enough that complaining felt petty and churlish.

As much as he hated to think it, the warmth of a comfortable little home in Vizima was likely enough to stop him feeling the need to voice any real complaints until the spring, and by then the improved roads and trade relations would bring all the pleasure of better, fresher food than he’d ever known, which would satisfy him well into the summer. By summer, it would be too hot to indulge seriously in any thoughts of troublemaking, which meant that anything he might have been planning would be delayed until the leaves turned.

At which point he would have become accustomed to collecting his pension and going home to his fire and reading quietly, carving little figures for the local children, visiting other retired Scoia’tael from time to time, though never so many at once that Nilfgaard might get nervous about it.

A peaceful, quiet life. The one he’d dreamed so often of.

None of this _pleased _him, exactly, but it did not _displease_ him nearly enough to discourage him from accepting it. Although he was by no means _old_ by elven standards, he was _tired_.

Which was why, on hearing a familiar plaintive moan from an alleyway, he very nearly walked right past.

But at the sight of three humans—young—putting the boot into a very familiar prone figure, Iorveth couldn’t quite stop himself.

The tallest and eldest and therefore likely the ringleader of the gang yelped as Iorveth’s casually-tossed throwing knife nicked his ear, sinking into a nearby wall with a satisfying _thunk_.

The three of them turned to face him.

“Another one,” the shortest human snarled. “I told you they travel in packs. Filthy half-breeds.”

Half-breed?

Iorveth had been called a great many things in his life, most of them far more unkind than _half-breed_, but that was certainly a new one. Few people would look at him and not know him to be a full-blood elf.

Indeed, many of them knew exactly _which_ full-blood elf he was and deferred or cowered appropriately. These boys were young, though. Perhaps too young to remember Iorveth’s reign of terror, or too far removed from it.

Roche moaned again.

“Listen,” Iorveth began. “That.” He pointed to the panting heap on the ground, “is Vernon Roche, and the only person allowed to put him in an early grave is me.”

They may not have recognised Iorveth, but Roche’s name seemed to give them pause. A whisper travelled between the three of them, the words “Roche” and “half-breed” the only ones Iorveth picked up.

“Perhaps I wasn’t clear,” Iorveth continued, louder this time. “I am happy to kill you to get to him, and more than capable of it.”

This, finally, had the desired effect.

The boys shared a look and a nod between them, and then bolted toward the other end of the alleyway.

They might have run past Iorveth. He’d had no intention of stopping them.

Cautious, Iorveth stepped into the alleyway. Despite the fact that he’d just staged what he felt was quite an impressive, heroic rescue, he knew better than to think that would save him from ending up on the wrong end of Roche’s blade if the commander was in the mood to kill him today.

Roche groaned again, rolling over to face Iorveth, his ever-present chaperon lying a foot away in the mud.

… which meant his gently-pointed ears were now on full display.

Half-breed.

That was what the boys had said, wasn’t it?

Roche didn’t rise to the level of _half_. A quarter, Iorveth would have guessed. Little enough that with his ears covered, few would ever notice.

But now that Iorveth _knew_, now that he’d seen, it was unmissable. It was in his eyes, the dramatic sweep of his cheekbones, his slender build despite being a career soldier, the natural way he melted into the shadows when he wanted to.

Now that Iorveth knew, it was impossible not to see.

“Oh, fuck,” Roche cursed, grabbing for his now-filthy chaperon and ramming it onto his head.

“You’re an elf,” Iorveth spluttered, too shocked by the revelation to do anything other than stare.

“Sod off, Iorveth,” Roche growled, hat more or less back in place. “I never asked you for help.”

“If you’re upset about not being kicked in the guts anymore, I’m happy to oblige,” Iorveth said.

But he _wasn__’t_. Not really. Because Roche was suddenly an elf.

Questions multiplied in Iorveth’s mind like rabbits in the spring.

_How?_

Well, the how he knew. When a human and an elf loved each other very much…

Or more often, when a human paid an elf—or didn’t—and let nature take its course. So Roche’s father…

No, his mother. They didn’t call him the son of a whore for nothing, did they? His mother had been half-elf. Not human enough for humans, but not elf enough for elves, either. The kind of person most likely to end up…

And then Roche had grown up with ears just pointy enough to be obvious.

But…

This changed everything. This… Roche hated elves, hated them viciously.

“But you’re an elf,” Iorveth repeated, the thought still filling the whole of his mind, pushing out all others. Roche was an elf. Roche was an _elf_, and he hated them so much.

“Hardly,” he huffed, picking himself up, the ridges of his cheekbones stained red with exertion or embarrassment or both.

He pushed his way past, shoulder slamming into Iorveth’s.

For a moment, Iorveth was too stunned to react.

In the next heartbeat, he had Roche pinned to the alley wall, one hand on each shoulder, pressing his advantage and staring, open-mouthed and wide-eyed.

“Get off me,” Roche growled, but those boys had done him enough injury that he was in no shape to fight off an opponent at full strength. He hissed as he struggled—ribs bruised or cracked, Iorveth thought—and then finally slumped.

Iorveth raised a trembling hand to push Roche’s chaperon off again. He’d always wondered what it was for. Certainly not because Roche thought it suited him.

It made a lot more sense, now.

Iorveth’s breath hitched as he touched the tip of his finger to the tip of Roche’s ear, the shock of feeling it warm and real and almost _familiar_ overwhelming for the barest moment. Roche, thankfully, didn’t take the opportunity to escape.

Fascinated, Iorveth ran his finger along the shell, habit making him press against the most sensitive spots. He stopped when a shudder ran through Roche, remembering himself.

This was not a friend to touch with aching affection, no matter what his ears looked like.

“Are you done?” Roche asked, annoyed where Iorveth was still focused on _processing_ this, understanding it.

Iorveth wasn’t done. He wasn’t done at all, he needed to sit down for a good long while and empty a bottle of Temerian rye down his throat before he’d even _begin_ to be done.

When he met Roche’s eyes, he was suddenly looking into the eyes of another elf.

All those times. All those times he’d stayed his blade or failed to take the perfect shot, he’d told himself it was because they were all better off with Roche alive. Better the devil they knew, better to listen to the rest of the meeting than end it prematurely with an assassination, better not to risk retaliation by murdering Foltest’s favourite.

Iorveth had been quicker to see to Foltest’s death than Roche’s.

And now he wondered if it was because something deep inside him knew he was looking at one of his own, and couldn’t quite _do_ it.

Iorveth had not yet killed another elf, and he didn’t plan to start now.

“_How?_” he asked.

Roche raised an eyebrow. “I know some propaganda says that elves are dying out because they’re too vain to plough each other, but even I hadn’t thought it was _true_.”

Right, well. Ask a stupid question.

Might as well have asked if he’d always been an elf.

“Iorveth,” Roche said, sharp but not loud. “Let me go.”

The request was so soft and so tired that Iorveth obeyed without a moment’s thought, backing away and watching as Roche walked off, arm wrapped around his middle.

He’d live. He’d seen worse.

And somehow, he was _an elf_.

***

It had been a great many years since Roche had even noticed his own ears, but now as he washed at a small basin by the window, he couldn’t stop touching them.

More specifically, running his fingers along the same path Iorveth’s had travelled.

He coughed, and his ribs protested, and the rain battered the window, a sheet of lightning illuminating the whole sky for less than a heartbeat before it was gone again.

That Iorveth was even _here_ came as a surprise. Surely he’d gone off to live in the woods and… play his flute all day, or something? Whatever it was _real_ elves did.

But no, of course not. Of course the gods had seen fit to specifically curse Vernon Roche. They’d never been kind to him before, why start now?

The look on Iorveth’s face came back to him, the wide-eyed fascination, a moment of… something. Something Roche could not describe but had never seen before, certainly not on Iorveth’s face, but not on any face he could remember, either.

Something shockingly soft and deep.

He tossed the thought aside, stripping down to his underwear to check the dark bruises in the tarnished mirror that had come with the rooms. A probing finger told him his ribs were bruised, cracked perhaps, but not broken. A few days, a week at most, and he’d be back to normal.

Well, no. There would never be a _normal_ again, now that Iorveth knew. That information was a weapon, and one Iorveth could have wielded with precise and deadly accuracy. Hiding his ears would no longer be enough.

The harsh thud of the window opening startled Roche out of his thoughts, and he turned just in time to see a soaked Iorveth righting himself after falling through it, dripping on the floor and holding…

A bottle.

Of Temerian Rye.

Roche stared for several long seconds.

“What,” he began. “The _hell_.” He paused, trying to decide on a question that might get him the most useful answer. “Are you climbing through my damned window for?”

Iorveth clearly had no intention of assassinating him, since Roche was quite confident he’d be dead by now—or at least being held at the point of a blade while Iorveth gloated about finally having won and mused on the possibility of taking his ear as a trophy.

“You would have closed the door on me,” Iorveth said, shrugging.

Roche blinked.

He wasn’t _wrong_, but that didn’t seem to answer Roche’s actual question.

“Why are you _here_?” he tried, willing himself not to cover any part of his body with his hands like a startled maiden.

It didn’t help that Iorveth was looking.

He paused, set the bottle down by the basin Roche had been washing in moments before, and patted himself down. A triumphant noise preceded him producing a small, squat jar and holding it out toward Roche. “Old elven remedy. For your ribs.”

Roche narrowed his eyes. “Why?”

Iorveth shrugged again. “Seemed impolite to break into your home empty-handed,” he said. “And if I drink the whole bottle myself,” he continued, nodding to it, “then I’m half as likely to get the answers I want. So. Thought we’d share.”

“I don’t have to answer to you,” Roche said, feeling all of twelve years old and in trouble with a merchant in the market square for running or fighting.

“No,” Iorveth agreed. “You don’t. But I bet you’ve got questions. Have had questions, all your life. I might have some answers.”

Silence fell between them.

Iorveth set the jar beside the bottle with a thunk, but made no attempt to leave.

Roche realised belatedly that he had not, actually, insisted that Iorveth _should_ leave.

“Fine,” he said before he’d reached any sort of conscious decision. At the very least, he needed to feel out how much of a threat Iorveth was to him now. “But stop dripping on my floor.”

Iorveth hesitated a moment, then stripped off his outer layers and draped them over a stool Roche had tucked under the stand the basin was on, revealing a thin cotton tunic cut almost as low as one of Ves’.

No, that was an exaggeration, but it was low enough to frame Iorveth’s delicate, dramatic collarbones.

Roche’s hand went to his own in the mirror, comparing his build to Iorveth’s. He wasn’t as lean, a little more thickly-muscled across the chest, less deceptively delicate.

But he didn’t have the powerful build of a full-blood human, nor the broad shoulders, nor the solid frame. He was too slim at the waist, narrower and lighter down to his bones. Useful attributes, all of them. It had made him _different_, and different came in handy.

From thief to spy, it had given him an advantage over others.

But not over Iorveth, who was, people said, one of the last _true_ elves. Untainted by human blood _or_ by living under human rule.

Iorveth, who was currently settling himself on the end of Roche’s bed, long legs stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankles, tilted back so his head rested against the wall, eye closed and face relaxed.

The thought that Iorveth was treating him as unthreatening made Roche bristle.

He could have killed him. Then and there, he could have killed him, and he’d have evidence that Iorveth had climbed in through his window, and he would have gotten _away_ with it. Even under Nilfgaardian rule.

But then there would _be_ no answers.

Iorveth was the only elf Roche had ever been able to trust.

The irony tasted bitter in the back of his throat, but he swallowed it and collected the sharp-smelling ointment and the bottle of rye, moving to settle just far enough away from Iorveth that they weren’t touching.

“Good,” Iorveth said, without so much as opening his eye. “Well, then. I’m an open book. Ask away.”

“How old are you?” Roche asked.

Iorveth, near as he could tell, had materialised after the second Nilfgaardian war and not existed a moment beforehand. That was the limitation on records. Someone had to keep them, and elves _didn__’t_.

“Not sure,” Iorveth said, but it wasn’t a deflection. A quiet admission, spoken with the air of a long-kept secret. “Lost track of time. Something like two hundred human years. Not old for an elf.”

“They say elven lifespans are three times human ones,” Roche said, twisting the bottle open. The whiskey burned on the way down, but not so badly as some of the bottles he’d drunk in his life.

He passed it over to Iorveth, who curled his long, callused fingers around the neck without having to look.

Roche wondered if that was because he was an elf, or because he’d gotten used to not seeing things.

“Half-elves, maybe,” Iorveth said. “Some elves are thousands of years old. Or have been. Our life expectancy shortened dramatically when we ran into humans.”

“Quarter-elves?” Roche asked.

“It is a quarter, then?” Iorveth responded.

“Yes. To the best of my knowledge.”

His mother, as far as he knew, had been a half-elf. His father couldn’t have afforded her if he wasn’t human, and wouldn’t have taken her if he was an elf.

So. One-quarter elf.

More human than elf. And yet not human _enough_.

Iorveth hummed. “You might see a hundred and fifty.”

Roche groaned at the thought. He’d had a hard enough forty-odd years so far. The thought of having more than twice that left to get through made his teeth ache.

“Or you might get mugged again and _not_ have me to save you next time.”

Roche huffed. “They would have left once I passed out,” he said, though he wasn’t sure it was the truth.

Iorveth drank a mouthful from the bottle and passed it back.

“Foltest knew?” he asked.

“Foltest knew,” Roche confirmed. “He was the one who suggested the chaperon.”

Iorveth swore under his breath in a language lost to Roche. In all his years of hunting elves, he’d picked up only a few words of Elder Speech.

The nastiest ones.

Roche drank another mouthful from the bottle, not in the mood, for once, to argue with Iorveth.

“No one else was interested in helping me,” Roche said. “Certainly not elves.”

“Do you know why full-blood elves don’t like halves and quarters?” Iorveth asked.

Roche had a lot of opinions, but waited to hear Iorveth’s.

“You’re a reminder that we’ll be gone one day. That in a world full of humans, we multiply too slowly to compete. That one day there will _be_ no full-blood elves. Thousands of years of history wiped out because human cocks are a little bigger.”

Roche watched Iorveth take his turn with the bottle, throat bobbing as he swallowed, head thrown back to expose his long, pale throat.

“Coming from an elf who was desperate to plough a dragon…”

“I was never desperate. And she likes dwarves, if you can believe.”

Roche snorted. “I’m not certain dwarves actually… you know…” He gestured vaguely, not sure he wanted to be having this conversation with Iorveth, but quite certain he’d never have it with anyone else.

“Oh, they do,” Iorveth said with a haunted air. “Be thankful you haven’t seen it.”

“Noted,” Roche said, though he found his mind was quick to provide a lineup of possibilities.

“It’s why humans don’t like elves, you know. Sex. It’s all about sex, in the end. Who’s having it, who’s not.”

“Well, I’m not,” Roche complained, drinking from the bottle again. They weren’t far enough through it to be talking like this.

But then, Iorveth was the closest thing Roche had to an old friend.

“Nor am I,” Iorveth admitted, fingers brushing against Roche’s as he accepted the bottle again. “What were we talking about?”

“Human cocks?” Roche suggested.

“Before that.”

“Foltest.”

Iorveth wrinkled his nose. “I suppose I shouldn’t speak ill of him, you’ll throw me out.”

“And you particularly want to stay?” Roche asked.

Iorveth shrugged. “It’s raining.”

It _was _still raining—pelting down like arrow-tips, as it always did in the winter in Temeria—but Iorveth had _come_ here in the rain. Rain was no hindrance to him.

On the other hand, Iorveth kicking his boots off with twin thuds seemed to answer the question fully. He did not intend to leave just yet.

“Why are you here?” Roche asked.

“Trying to work through the shock of your ears,” Iorveth said, finally looking at him.

Roche hadn’t covered them, and he knew the points were sticking out between strands of hair.

“What will you do, now that you know?”

Iorveth tipped the bottle up to swallow another few mouthfuls, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand before passing it over again.

“Understand why you’re still alive, for one. Never could quite kill you.”

Roche remembered a forest in Flotsam, Iorveth holding a blade at his throat, tearing his insignia off.

But not killing him.

He wondered how many other times he’d been spared because Iorveth simply _couldn__’t, _for reasons he didn’t understand.

“You didn’t _know_.”

“I didn’t know why I couldn’t do it,” Iorveth said. “But I knew I couldn’t, every time I tried. I’ve had you in my sights a dozen times and never loosed the arrow. I’ve warned other people off you. Told them you were mine to deal with.”

A shiver rolled down Roche’s spine. Iorveth had done that again, in the alleyway. Claimed possession of his life—or at least his early death.

And yet he had always given orders to take Iorveth alive or not at all. So perhaps…

Perhaps there was something to that.

“I’ve never killed an elf,” Iorveth said.

“And I’m an elf?” Roche asked. He never had been before. Not elf _enough_. Not human enough. Always stuck between the two worlds.

Iorveth nodded without any hesitation. “You might not like it. I even understand why you don’t like it. But anything not entirely human is non-human, isn’t it?”

Roche pondered that thought as he swirled the remaining whiskey around the bottle, raising it to his lips and letting just a few drops roll over his tongue.

_Elf_.

He’d tried not to be. All his life, he’d tried to be anything else, to be _normal_.

And yet hearing Iorveth—last of the _real_ elves, people said—say it…

Something inside him gave. Something he’d been holding onto for a long, long time.

“Yes,” Roche agreed. “Yes, it is.”

He’d been fighting being _non-human_ so hard he’d even fought non-humans to prove it, and it all felt so _pointless_, and Iorveth was sitting inches away from him, sharing a bottle of whiskey with him and telling him he _was_ non-human, and there was no getting away from it.

And Roche was just tired enough to agree.

“You’re not planning to use this against me?” Roche asked, remembering what he’d been getting at before.

“No,” Iorveth said simply. “My inclination to work against you has evaporated. Sorry. You’ll have to drink yourself to death instead.”

Well. That would at least have been a very elven way to go.

Even now, Roche found no pleasure in the thought. Not even the darkest of dark amusement.

Just sadness. Sadness for everything he’d lost, and never had, and would never have again.

“If you cared at all about elves you’d slit my throat and be done with it,” Roche said. “That would be kinder than… this.”

“Regret?” Iorveth asked.

Roche sipped at the bottle in his hand, running his tongue over his teeth.

Yes. Regret.

A long-covered hole that had opened up in his chest the moment Iorveth called him _non-human_, and meant it. A hole he had been hiding even from himself for so long he’d almost forgotten it was there.

Roche’s stomach clenched.

“Fuck you,” he growled, pushing the bottle into Iorveth’s hand.

Iorveth chuckled, draining the bottle and setting it aside.

“Bet you’ve never had your ears touched properly,” he said.

Roche looked at him, and his smug smirk that was just begging to be bitten clean off his face.

_“Properly,” _he pronounced, rolling the word around on his tongue as if doing so would help him unravel what Iorveth meant by that.

“Properly,” Iorveth repeated, shifting minutely so he was more facing Roche than sitting next to him. “Don’t tell me you’ve never tried it.”

“Tried it?”

Iorveth’s frustrated growl might have made a lesser man flinch, the way he reached out without preamble might have caused another person to duck out of the way, but Roche’s certainty that Iorveth no longer wished to harm him was so complete that he simply waited for the contact.

A sharp frisson of pleasure sparked as Iorveth’s bow-callused fingers brushed against the delicate skin behind his ear.

“Properly,” Iorveth said, closer to a purr this time. He rose to his knees, shuffling over as Roche froze in place, guts twisting with… _something._

Not fear. Anticipation.

“Like _this_,” Iorveth added, catching an even more sensitive spot this time and sending a bolt of pleasure straight to Roche’s cock, an unexpected moan escaping him.

Iorveth stopped dead, gaze swinging to Roche’s face with more intensity than a single eye should have been able to muster.

The moment stretched into an impossible infinity.

Roche gasped into Iorveth’s mouth as they crashed together, a kiss that was too much teeth and not enough tongue and shouldn’t have been happening anyway.

A brief struggle for dominance ended with Roche letting Iorveth take—take whatever he wanted, take the guilt and shame and pain—and ease him onto the mattress, callused fingers clever between them as he pushed clothing out of the way, rough but practiced. Was this what elves did?

Iorveth’s sharp row of teeth dug deep into Roche’s lower lip, hard enough to draw up a bruise as he wrapped long fingers around the two of them, pausing to spit in his hand and slick the way, nose buried in Roche’s shoulder, breathing him in deeply.

Iorveth smelled of whiskey and rain and the forest and _home, _Roche realised with a twist in his stomach. But the twist wasn’t as disgusted as it should have been, and the familiarity ran deep, and the touch of his hand and the rhythm of his breathing and the way his breath ghosted over the sensitive shell of Roche’s ear felt _good_.

A hard bite and a low growl as Iorveth came, pushing Roche over the edge the next moment, vision whiting out and pleasure overriding fear and shame and regret for one bright, glorious second before the peak of his orgasm faded back, exhaustion pulling him into velvet-black sleep without another conscious thought.

***

“I’m not an elf,” Roche said, curling onto his side, away from Iorveth as he carded his fingers through short hair.

“Alas, you are.”

Iorveth wasn’t sure he’d gotten the answers he wanted last night. The burning question he hadn’t asked still tickled the back of his throat.

_Why?_

But of course, he knew the question was an insult. Few elves would have shown a quarter-elf any kind of loyalty, compassion, or anything short of contempt. Like those boys had spat at him, he was a half-breed. Neither elf nor man to most of them.

Iorveth had lived long enough to see that it didn’t matter one bit to humans that someone like Roche was, by majority, _human_. For them, it was all or nothing.

If elves were going to oppose that, then they had to take the people humans didn’t want. All non-humans, or none.

Even Roche.

Roche had done awful things, but Iorveth was by no means innocent. It was no longer his place to judge, or to mete out vengeance.

So where did that _leave_ them?

_Alas_ was the word.

“I don’t _want_ to be an elf,” Roche complained, and it was the complaint of a child, one who was tired of being picked on and singled out by the other children.

One who’d felt the sting of being an elf with no other elves to defend him.

Yes, Roche had done terrible things. But terrible things, Iorveth had no doubt, had been done to him.

Violence begot violence, and the cycle continued.

This was a chance to break it. Not the whole thing. Petting Vernon Roche’s hair and lying in bed with him until the sun rose high enough to shame them into getting up would not bring the whole history of human-elf aggression crashing down around their ears.

But it would save two very tired people—two very tired elves, whether Roche liked it or not—from themselves, and each other.

“Neither do I, particularly,” Iorveth said. “But I can’t solve it by wearing a hat.”

“Why are you still…”

“Here?” Iorveth asked. “Not sure,” he said honestly. “But I think…”

It was a lot. It was so much, and perhaps it’d be impossible, and maybe he was lying to himself and Roche and every elf, full, half, quarter, and otherwise.

“I think you’re stuck with me,” he said softly. “Because I don’t make any sense in a world without you, and you…”

“There is no Vernon Roche without Iorveth,” Roche said. “We sort of. Come as a pair.”

“Mm,” Iorveth agreed. That was bolder than he would have stated it, but true nevertheless. “How’s your Elder Speech?”

“Limited to insults you’ve spat at me,” Roche said.

Iorveth chuckled. When he wasn’t actively trying to kill him, Roche was fun.

Elven. Very elven. Iorveth should have noticed sooner.

“We’ll start there, then.”

And perhaps, once enough time had passed, the two of them might find some peace.

**Author's Note:**

> IDK I've always thought maybe we were *meant* to think Roche is part-elf, I feel like there are clues, who knows ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ (I'm in a lot of pain, this would be more coherent were I not)


End file.
